Podcast

Culture

S&U interviews

Weirdness

27 December 2023

5 min read

My conversation with... Tom Holland

Noticing that Tom Holland is the star of The Rest Is Politics Christmas special, Belle Tindall is remembering her conversation with the historian earlier this year.

Belle Tindall

Belle is the staff writer at Seen & Unseen and co-host of its Re-enchanting podcast.

A man sits at a table speaking into a microphone but looks into the distance. Behind him, through the window and beyond a wall is Big Ben

Tom Holland recording the podcast at Lambeth Palace Library.

In a festive one-off, two worlds have collided. Tom Holland, of the beloved 'The Rest is History' podcast, has joined Rory Stewart and Alistair Campbell in their 'The Rest is Politics' parallel universe. They spend a merry hour talking through religion, politics and the way in which they have both shaped our modern world... plus dinosaurs, always dinosaurs.

And it got me reminiscing - my mind drifted back to earlier in this slightly odd year, on the eve of the coronation, when we had the one and only Tom Holland on our podcast. We called that episode of the podcast - Re-Enchanting History and the Coronation - but for me, it could just as aptly be entitled Re-Enchanting the Weird.

Below is a reflection that I wrote immediately after that fascinating episode was recorded. If you've enjoyed his appearance on The Rest is Politics, you may just enjoy his appearance here too.

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Re-Enchanting the Weird

Let me start in the proper place, with introductions.

If you are a fan of history, Tom needs no introduction. But, for those of you who are not yet acquainted with his wonderfully infectious expertise, Tom is the co-host of the beloved podcast, The Rest is History (alongside Dominic Sandbrook). He is also the best-selling author of Rubicon, Persian Fire, Dominion, and the up-coming book for children, The Wolf-Girl, The Greeks, and The Gods. Justin Brierley and I recently had the pleasure of soaking up a little of Tom’s extensive knowledge when we interviewed him for a Coronation special of Seen and Unseen’s Re-Enchanting podcast.

Tom’s most recent book, Dominion, charts the mighty impact that the Christian revolution has had; beginning with its unexpected origins and following its cultural reverberations through to the present age, highlighting its very present influence. We are, to borrow Tom’s own phrase, a society of goldfish who are (perhaps unknowingly) swimming in a distinctly Christian fishbowl. And so, our conversation began there – as he pointed out that, like it or not, the West operates in the residue of the Christian revolution. Christianity has been hidden in plain sight all along. For the sake of eloquence, I’ll let Tom explain:

‘The conceit of the West is that it’s transcended Christianity to become purely universal, purely global. But its values, its assumptions, its ethics remain palpably bred of the marrow of Christianity’.

Throughout our conversation, Tom took us on a whistle-stop tour of what was, what is, and the thread that can be drawn between the two. And while I don’t wish to spoil things for you, I imagine you can guess what the thread is. This conversation touches upon the origins of democracy (as we perceive it), the Reformation and the Nazis, to name but a few. I couldn’t recommend it enough. But I must warn you, you cannot un-hear Tom’s observations. The things he points out, you simply cannot un-see. Christianity will no longer be hidden; it will just be in plain sight.

Seen as it is within in touching distance, we also wanted to get Tom’s thoughts on the Coronation. And this is where the re-enchantment of the weird began. At least, for me.

The very notion of this upcoming Coronation is odd. It is a distinctly peculiar event.

Firstly, it is incredibly old. We are the only country in the world that still does this particular thing in this particular way. What we will see unfold before us is derived from the 10th Century, when King Edgar was coronated by St. Dunstan, and yet it goes back further still - its roots actually lie in Bronze Age Israel.

During the Coronation, the ancient and the modern will converge. As spectators, we will be peeking into times gone by; as Tom (rather excitedly) said, watching this ceremony, and everything that will surround it, will be like ‘seeing a dinosaur… still alive… in a zoo’. I wrote that last week’s conversation with astrophysicist, Dr. Jennifer Wiseman, made me feel small – small in time and small in place. Well, in many ways, so did Tom’s thoughts on the Coronation. The ritual is so very old, and we, so very young.

But there is more. Tom reminded us that the Coronation is not only old, it’s weird. It places the mystical, the supernatural, the sacred, and the down-right strange on centre stage.

Nick Cave, who will be sitting in Westminster Abbey on the day despite not being much of a royalist, explained that he accepted the invitation purely because of its bewildering oddness. In his Red Hand Files, he wrote

‘what I am also not is so spectacularly incurious about the world and the way it works, so ideologically captured, so damn grouchy, as to refuse an invitation to what will more than likely be the most important historical event in the UK of our age. Not just the most important, but the strangest, the weirdest.’

Both Nick Cave and Tom Holland have allowed themselves the fun of being curious. Curious about the fact that something profoundly supernatural is about to be taken incredibly seriously in the heart of a so-called secular society. And whatever pragmatic questions I may have about the place of monarchy in the here and now, I think I will allow myself the fun of being curious about that too.

My conversation with Tom re-enchanted the parts of Christianity that, as someone who grew up as a Christian, I used to be quite embarrassed by. Namely, the weirdest parts.

As a teenager, my instinct was to minimise (at least in public) the aspects of the Christian faith that cannot be explained by rationalism. I used to keep quiet about the parts of my faith that outed me as someone who believed in things that are supernatural. I would try my absolute best to blur the details of the most obscure facets of Christian thinking. But, as Tom said, ‘a Christianity that has bled itself of enchantment is a pallid thing.’ And if there is one thing that the whole Jesus movement was not, it’s pallid.

If you, like Tom Holland, crave enchantment, this episode will be for you. Afterall, what better place to go looking for the wonderfully weird than in the ‘greatest story ever told’?

Article

Belief

Culture

Mental Health

Pride

17 September 2025

4 min read

Are AI chatbots actually demons in disguise?

Early Christian thinkers explain chatbots better than Silicon Valley does

Gabrielle Thomas

Gabrielle Thomas is Assistant Professor of Early Christianity and Anglican Studies at Emory University

An AI image of a person stood holding a phone with a bubble above their head, below them is a chatbot-like demon with a tail

Nick Jones/Midjourney.ai.

AI Chatbots. They’re here to save us, aren’t they? Their designers argue so, fervently. There’s no doubt they are useful. Some, like EpiscoBOT (formerly known as ‘Cathy’), are designed for those asking ‘life’s biggest questions. 'Our girlfriend Scarlett’, is an AI companion who “is always eager to please you in any way imaginable.” So why not defend them?

They offer companionship for the lonely, spark creativity when we run on empty, and make us more productive. They also provide answers for any and every kind of question without hesitation. They are, in short, a refuge. Many chatbots come with names, amplifying our sense of safety. Names define and label things, but they do far more than that. Names foster connection. They can evoke and describe a relationship, allowing us to make intimate connections with the things named. When the “things” in question are AI chatbots, however, we can run into trouble.

According to a study conducted by researchers at Stanford University, chatbots can contribute to “harmful stigma and dangerous responses.” More than this, they can even magnify psychotic symptoms. The more we learn, the more we are beginning to grasp that the much of the world offered by AI chatbots is an illusory one.

Early Christian thinkers had a distinct category for precisely this kind of illusion: the demonic. They understood demons not as red, horned bodies or fiery realms, but as entities with power to fabricate illusions—visions, appearances, and deceptive signs that distorted human perception of reality. Demons also personified pride. As fallen angels, they turned away from truth toward themselves. Their illusions lured humans into sharing that pride—believing false greatness, clinging to false refuge.

Looking back to early Christian approaches to demonology may help us see more clearly what is at stake in adopting without question AI chatbots.

According to early Christian thinkers, demons rarely operated through brute force. Instead, they worked through deception. Athanasius of Alexandria (c. 296–373) was a bishop and theologian who wrote Life of Antony. In this, he recounted how the great desert father was plagued by demonic visions—phantoms of wild beasts, apparitions of gold, even false angels of light. The crucial danger was not physical attack but illusion. Demons were understood as beings that manufactured appearances to confuse and mislead. A monk in his cell might see radiant light and hear beautiful voices, but he was to test it carefully, for demons disguise themselves as angels.

Evagrius Ponticus (c. 345–399), a Christian monk, ascetic, and theologian influential in early monastic spirituality, warned that demons insinuated themselves into thought, planting ideas that felt self-generated but in fact led one astray. This notion—that the demonic is most effective when it works through appearances—shaped the entire ascetic project. To resist demons meant to resist their illusions.

Augustine of Hippo (354–430) was a North African bishop and theologian whose writings shaped Western Christianity. In his book The City of God, he argued that pagan religion was largely a vast system of demonic deception. Demons, he argued, produced false miracles, manipulated dreams, and inspired performances in the theatre to ensnare the masses. They trafficked in spectacle, seducing imagination and desire rather than presenting truth.

AI chatbots function in a strikingly similar register. They do not exert power by physical coercion. Instead, they craft illusion. They can produce an authoritative-sounding essay full of falsehoods. They can create images of people doing something that never happened. They can provide companionship that leads to self-harm or even suicide. Like the demonic, the chatbot operates in the register of vision, sound, and thought. It produces appearances that persuade the senses while severing them from reality. The risk is not that the chatbot forces us, but that it deceives us—just like demonic powers.

Using AI chatbots, too, tempts us with illusions of pride. A writer may pass off AI-generated work as their own, for example. The danger here is not simply being deceived but becoming complicit in deception, using illusion to magnify ourselves. Early Christian theologians like Athansius, Evagrius and Augustine, warned that pride was the surest sign of demonic influence. To the extent that AI tempts us toward inflated images of ourselves, it participates in the same pattern.

When it comes to AI chatbots, we need a discipline of discernment—testing whether the images and texts bear the marks of truth or deception. Just as monks could not trust every appearance of light, we cannot trust every image or every confident paragraph produced by the chatbots. We need criteria of verification and communities of discernment to avoid mistaking illusion for reality.

Help is at hand.

Through the ages, Christians have responded to demonic illusions, not with naïve credulity nor blanket rejection of the sensory world, but through the hard work of discernment: testing appearances, cultivating disciplines of resistance, and orienting desire toward truth.

The Life of Antony describes how the monk confronted demonic illusions with ascetic discipline. When confronted by visions of treasure, Antony refused to be moved by desire. When assailed by apparitions, he remained in prayer. He tested visions by their effects: truthful visions produced humility, peace, and clarity, while demonic illusions provoked pride, disturbance, and confusion. We can cultivate a way of life that does the same. Resisting the illusions may require forms of asceticism: fasting from chatbots and cultivating patience in verification.

Chatbot illusions are not necessarily demonic in themselves. The key is whether the illusion points beyond itself toward truth and reality, or whether it traps us in deception.

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